Xiaomi has finally introduced their long-rumored ‘Pinecone’ mobile processor, the Pinecone Surge S1. Xiaomi has been teasing this SoC quite a bit lately, and we’ve been seeing rumors regarding it for months now. Well, the Pinecone Surge S1 is now official, along with the Xiaomi Mi 5c which we’ll talk about in a separate post, let’s first talk more about the company’s long-awaited processor, and see where it belongs when it comes to the mobile SoC market, read on.
The Pinecone Surge S1 is a 64-bit octa-core processor, we’re looking at four Cortex A53 cores here clocked at 2.2GHz, and four Cortex A53 cores clocked at 1.4GHz, in other words, Xiaomi has opted to utilize a big.LITTLE SoC design here. For those of you who are wondering this chip has been built using a 28nm HPC+ manufacturing process, and ARM’s Mali-T860 MP4 GPU is here to take care of graphics processing. This processor offers support for Cat. 4 LTE, dual channel LPDDR3 933MHz, and also offers the latest Vulkan standard. In addition to everything we’ve mentioned, the processor offer 32-bit DSP support, while it also supports VoLTE and 16kHz sampling. 14-bit dual ISP offers increased light sensitivity up to 150%, and also a dual noise reduction algorithm which is supposed to reduce noise and presser image detail. All of this is supposed to result in great images, even if the lighting is not exactly ideal. Xiaomi has also added their own layer of security on top of this chip, which is, allegedly, upgradable. You will, essentially, be able to receive OTA (over-the-air) upgrades for this processor, which is quite interesting. As part of that layer of security on top of the Pinecone Surge S1, this chip comes with mechanisms which are supposed to prevent data leakage. On top of all that, the Pinecone Surge S1 supports smartphone display resolutions up to 2560 x 1600 pixels.
Xiaomi says that this chip managed to outperform the Snapdragon 625, which Xiaomi sees as a chip in Pinecone Surge S1’s shooting range. So, all in all, the Pinecone Surge S1 processor is a mid-range SoC, and it is not expected to compete with some high-end offerings out there, and Xiaomi will use it for their mid-range smartphones, like the Xiaomi Mi 5c which was also introduced today, and which we’ll talk about in a separate article, as already mentioned.